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johncolanduonilast Thursday at 4:08 AM1 replyview on HN

Mach is not a very good microkernel at all, because the overhead is much higher than necessary. The L4 family’s IPC design is substantially more efficient, and that’s why they’re used in actual systems. Fuchsia/Zircon have improved on the model further.

Someone will of course bring up XNU, but the microkernel aspect of it died when they smashed the FreeBSD kernel into the codebase. DriverKit has brought some userspace drivers back, but they use shared memory for all the heavy lifting.


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saagarjhalast Thursday at 2:54 PM

> Mach is not a very good microkernel at all, because the overhead is much higher than necessary. The L4 family’s IPC design is substantially more efficient, and that’s why they’re used in actual systems.

As opposed to Mach, which is not used in any actual systems

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